


Perfect Men and Other Crimes

by lanestreets



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Cop AU, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Misunderstandings, Modern Bucky Barnes, Modern Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-04 16:08:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16349813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanestreets/pseuds/lanestreets
Summary: Bucky Barnes knows that he is lucky. He still cannot help but feel decidedly unlucky when he hears the New York Police Department’s new policy on partnering regular cops with enhanced ones.Bucky doesn’t have anything against enhanced individuals. He really doesn’t. But he is still profoundly uncomfortable around people who could snap him like a twig. Detective Steven Grant Rogers is exactly that.





	Perfect Men and Other Crimes

**Author's Note:**

> and [a steve rogers playlist](http://www.konokalakaua.tumblr.com/post/179202433211/konokalakaua-nomad-a-steve-rogers-playlist-for) to go along with this!  
> also, i am playing fast and loose with steve's abilities in this fic, ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Bucky Barnes knows how lucky he is. He knows how lucky he is to have the job opportunities he has had. He knows how lucky he is to have the friends that he has. He knows how lucky he is to have gotten into the Stark Robotics Prosthetics Test Project. 

He knows how lucky he is to be alive. 

Bucky Barnes knows that he is lucky.

He still cannot help but feel decidedly unlucky when he hears the New York Police Department’s new policy on partnering regular cops with enhanced ones. 

Bucky doesn’t have anything against enhanced individuals. He really doesn’t. But he is still profoundly uncomfortable around people who could snap him like a twig. Detective Steven Grant Rogers is exactly that. 

A retired Army Captain, Steven Grant Rogers is the result of some half-baked experiment by a mad scientist that enhanced each of his senses, his reflexes, his strength, his speed, made him grow almost a foot and gain almost a hundred pounds. He lead an elite unit for the US Army, the SHIELD task force, for a few years, before a classified mission that ended with Rogers coming home for an extended recovery, and ultimately lead to his retirement from the service. Seems like he couldn’t keep himself from wanting to help others, though, because he’d wound up becoming a pretty stellar detective with the NYPD.

And now, he’s Bucky’s new partner, because with the uptick in crimes involving enhanced individuals, the department thought it best to change all assignments so that each pairing had at least one enhanced officer, for safety reasons. Bucky’s less than thrilled. His previous partner, Detective Ben Parker, had been a perfectly fine man. Bucky liked working with him, he was a good cop. But Ben sure as shit isn’t enhanced, and try as Bucky might to convince the powers that be that his fancy prosthetic is an enhancement, they’d been split up when the new orders came down from on high. 

It could be said that Bucky is not going into this new partnership with a positive disposition. 

Which is why he takes his own car to a scene when he gets a call saying he’s been assigned a case. He could’ve waited the two minutes for Rogers to get into the precinct, and driven there with him, but he’s going to be just a little petty about this. 

Sue him. 

Rogers, the bastard, seems entirely unfazed by this when he gets to their scene, smiling and holding out a steaming cup of coffee to Bucky. 

“Hey, nice to meet you, James,” he greets as Bucky eyes up the coffee and takes it hesitantly. “Steve Rogers. Thought the coffee would be a good ice breaker,” he says, as he scratches the back of his neck, sheepishly. 

The guy’s taller than Bucky and can bench press a truck and he looks sheepish? Give him a break. This is ridiculous. 

“Thanks,” Bucky responds shortly, “And it’s Bucky. No one calls me James.”

“Bucky it is then,” Steve says, without missing a beat. Bucky wants to scowl, but the coffee Rogers brought him is actually really good, and that has to count for something, so he settles for a vaguely disgruntled look and a curt nod in thanks. 

“Scene’s this way, in the bedroom. Looks like our perp busted in the front door and made his way through the apartment, shot our vic when he realized the guy was home, and then ransacked the place. Looks like a standard regular robbery gone wrong,” Bucky says as he leads Steve through the apartment to where the coroner is preparing the body to be transported back to the M.E.’s office. 

Steve follows Bucky without issue, but pauses in the doorway, tilting his head to the side. His face gradually gets more and more concerned until it finally settles in a scowl, complete with furrowed brows, as he steps into the room. 

He shakes his head as he crouches next to the body, and then rights himself again. “Not a robbery gone wrong, Barnes, and the perp’s not male. I can smell a trace of perfume and there’s none of that in the apartment, and there’s something else, a chemical smell and something metallic. It’s abnormal, out of place here. But it’s only a trace again. Whatever that was, it’s missing. I think the rest of this was just a distraction. Whatever is missing, I think that was the real goal here.”

Now, Bucky scowls to match Rogers. Of course the guy dismantles his whole theory in the first five minutes he’s here. Goddammit. 

But he’s right. Sure, there are watches missing from the case, and a missing laptop and phone, but the guy’s wallet is still on his nightstand, untouched. The TV is still in place, there are other valuables untouched. If this was a robbery, it was a poor one. 

Bucky’s got to side with Rogers. Something else was the goal here, and they need to figure it out quick, to make sure it’s not going to pose a bigger threat to the general Brooklyn public. This simple case just got… a lot more complicated. 

Shit.

This is so off to a great start. 

Bucky wants to bang his head against a wall. He settles for groaning, and stepping out so the CSI techs can do their job.

Steve, unfortunately, follows him. 

Bucky takes out his phone and opens the Notes app to start taking down what Steve had said, and the other things he’d noticed at their scene. He wanders down the hall to the elevator and ignores when Steve get in with him, and continues ignoring Steve as he steps out of the elevator and heads outside. He’s scanning the area for traffic cams, ATMs, and security cams to pull footage from to see if they can get a glimpse at their killer when Steve clears his throat and speaks up. 

“I take it you’re not thrilled with the reassignment orders,” Steve guesses, and Bucky sighs, slipping his phone into his pocket. 

“The exact opposite of thrilled,” he mutters, and finishes his coffee in one swig. His metal arm whirs, and he flexes the hand of it to try to make it relax. It only partially works.

Steve pulls a face Bucky doesn’t really care enough to decipher at this very moment. 

“You’re a vet, like me, right?” Steve asks him, after a beat of silence.

Bucky scoffs. “I’m nothing like you.” It comes out harsher than he meant it to, and he can tell that Steve noticed, because it’s almost like he physically changes in the second after that. 

Steve takes a step away from Bucky, sets his feet a little farther apart, and hunches his shoulders just a bit, and the difference it makes is enormous. He goes from a commanding presence, every inch the powerful man he is, to a much quieter look in a blink of an eye, his face full of concern.

“Look, Barnes,” he says, quiet, “I know that not everyone’s real big on enhanced people. I know people like me have done a lot of damage. But I’m not all that different from a regular person. I didn’t go through all this trouble being a soldier and a cop just to lose it and start hurting people one day.” Steve takes a deep breath and scrubs a hand over his face, and Bucky suddenly feels like an asshole. He almost goes to speak but Steve beats him to it. “You don’t have to like me, or what I can do. But until the department finishes implementing all of the assignment changes, we’re stuck with each other, so you’ve gotta work with me. At least until things settle down. I’m going to start knocking on doors to see what I can find out about our vic. I can see a traffic cam across the street and the building’s got security, if you were going to pull footage.”

And with that, Steve is walking back into the building’s lobby, still hunched up to make himself smaller, for Bucky’s comfort. 

Bucky really feels like an asshole. 

He follows Steve back in, and stands almost inside the door debating calling after him or not. He’s just about to stop staring at his partner’s retreating back and go find someone who can get him the building’s security tapes when Steve stops dead in his tracks. Steve’s whole body tenses and Bucky has a brief, wild thought, that Steve’s going to round on him. He’s halfway to bracing himself for a hit he’s certain isn’t actually going to come when Steve whips around and shoves Bucky to the side. 

He barely gets out a “Get down!” before the loud clap of three gunshots sounds through the lobby, and Bucky throws up his metal arm to protect his head on instinct. It turns out he doesn’t actually need to do that, though, because while Bucky has thrown up his arm, Steve has put his entire body in between Bucky and their shooter. Bucky takes a moment to think,  _ you stupid reckless idiot _ , before he draws his weapon and runs out onto the street, trying to locate where the shots came from. He sees it, when a flash of sunlight off of a metal briefcase catches his eye. Looks like their perp didn’t get a chance to leave the area before the uniforms responded to the initial shots fired call. 

Bucky raises his weapon but the woman slips into the panicked crowd on the sidewalk, and Bucky can’t get off a shot without putting civilians at risk. He calls in the incident as he turns to run back into the lobby to see if Steve got a better look at the perp and nearly comes crashing to a halt when he lays eyes on the scene in front of him. Steve’s helping a young woman to her feet, shuffling her out of the way of a spray of broken glass, which Bucky’s entirely unsurprised about. He seems like the kind of guy who helps little old ladies cross streets and pulls cats out of trees. It’s very in character.

But Steve’s also bleeding profusely from his shoulder, and Bucky watches in horrified fascination as Steve rips his sleeve to get a better looks at the wound, and then rips two bullets out of his body with only a muffled grunt of pain. Bucky grimaces in sympathy, but Steve doesn’t even take a beat to ride out the waves of agony he must be feeling (Bucky’s been shot before, he knows how it feels). He just strides across the lobby in two broad steps and looks at Bucky. 

“What happened to the shooter?” he asks, and Bucky has to open and close his mouth a few times before he can get it to work. 

He’s still staring at Steve’s bloody shoulder as he speaks. “She slipped into the crowd and I lost her. I called it in, to see if we can get up a perimeter before she really gets away,” he says, and then, without missing a beat, continues, “I’m sorry, can we talk about the fact that I just watched you pull bullets out of your body? Cause I can’t get past that.”

Steve shrugs, and winces a little when that tugs at his injured shoulder. 

“I heal fast,” Steve says quietly, his voice just strained enough to show that he’s more hurt than he’s letting on. “If I left the bullets there, I’d heal around them, and I’d have to have them surgically removed. With how fast I metabolise drugs, this is just easier for everyone involved.” 

Bucky grimaces, because that sounds extremely unpleasant, even though Steve’s stating it like he’s reading off the weather forecast. The sun will shine, the wind will blow, and Steve will have to dig bullets out of himself. It’s actually a little concerning. A thought flicks across Bucky’s mind that if Steve metabolises drugs too fast for them to be of any use, he had to go through his entire recovery for whatever got him discharged entirely without help. That’s even more concerning, so Bucky just stops thinking about Steve all together. 

He is definitely not thinking about how hot it was when Steve ripped the shoulder of his shirt open with just one hand. 

He isn’t.

He is  _ not. _

He is. 

Dammit.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @ [cptnsmarvel!](http://www.cptnsmarvel.tumblr.com/) i love hearing from you all!


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